Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/567

Rh Having witnessed on the ground all the miseries brought upon Eastern Siberia by penal servitude and forced colonization, I regard it as my sacred duty to bear witness before your Imperial Majesty that every measure looking to the localization of penal servitude and the limitation of exile will be, for the people of Eastern Siberia, the greatest possible of boons. The adoption of such measures is necessary in order to regulate this exile system, which is an ulcer upon the Empire, and which swallows up an immense quantity of money to no purpose. I have not concealed from the Minister of the Interior the present unsatisfactory state of the exile system, penal servitude, and prisons in the country intrusted to my care. The chief prison administration comes to my assistance as far as possible, but its means are limited and if serious measures are not taken we shall be confronted by very great difficulties, of which it seems to me my duty to give notice in time.

In concluding this part of my report, I must offer, for the most gracious consideration of your Imperial Majesty, a few words concerning the State [political] criminals now living in Eastern Siberia. On the 1st of January, 1882, they numbered in all 430 persons, as follows:

All of the state criminals belonging to the penal-servitude class are held at the Kará gold-mines, under guard of a foot-company of the Trans-Baikál Cossacks consisting of two hundred men. The sending of these criminals to work with the common convicts in the gold-placers is impossible. To employ them in such work in isolation from the others is very difficult, on account of the lack of suitable working-places, their unfitness for hard physical labor, and the want of an adequate convoy. If to these considerations be added the fact that unproductive hard labor, such as that employed in other countries merely to subject the prisoner to severe physical exertion, is not practised with us, it will become apparent that we have no hard labor for this class of criminals to perform, and the local authorities, who are in charge of them, and who are held to strict accountability for escapes, are compelled, by force of circumstances, to limit themselves to keeping such state criminals in prison under strict guard, employing them, occasionally, in work within the prison court, or not far from it. Such labor has not the character of penal servitude, but may rather be regarded as hygienic. Immunity from hard labor, however, does not render the lot of state criminals an